#  Claude Cahun's Curiosity 

 



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####  calendar\_today Date and Time 

 **September 23, 2025** 

 05:00PM - 06:30PM EDT 

####  pin\_drop Location 

 **Barker Center, Room 133**  



 

 



 

## [FRANCE AND THE WORLD](/france-and-world)

## SPEAKER: Hannah Freed-Thall, New York University

Abstract: This talk explores the anti-fascistic potential of curiosity, taking avant-garde artist Claude Cahun as a case study. In 1930, Cahun and their partner Marcel Moore published *Cancelled Confessions —* a genre-exploding anti-memoir, alt-Surrealist collage experiment, and visual-verbal remapping of the genderqueer body. In place of Surrealism’s libidinal fixation on woman-as-muse, *Cancelled Confessions* offers up trans/queer curiosity as its edgy, wayward ethos. Hannah Freed-Thall will discuss how Cahun and Moore’s fierce defiance still speaks to us today.

### About the Speaker

Hannah Freed-Thall is Professor of French Literature, Thought and Culture at NYU. She is the author of *Spoiled Distinctions: Aesthetics and the Ordinary in French Modernism* (Oxford UP, 2015), which was awarded the Scaglione Prize for French & Francophone Studies and the Modernist Studies Association Prize for a First Book, and *Modernism at the Beach: Queer Ecologies and the Coastal Commons* (Columbia UP, 2023), which received the Modernist Studies Association Book Prize.



 

 



 

 See also:- [ Seminar ](/event-type/seminar)
- [ France and the World ](/seminars/france-and-world)
 
 

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